The Hustle (2019)

Men always underestimate us. Josephine Chesterfield (Anne Hathaway) is a glamorous, seductive British woman who likes defrauding gullible men out of their money. Into her well-ordered, meticulous world comes cunning and fun-loving Australian woman Penny Rust (Rebel Wilson) who loves to swindle unsuspecting marks. Despite their different methods, the two soon join forces to combine their talents for the ultimate score – a young and naive tech billionaire Thomas Westerburg (Alex Sharp) in the lovely Riviera town of Beaumont-sur-mer in the the South of France… My condition is 100% mental.  This remake of Bedtime Story (1964) and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) coasts on the comic gifts of at least one of its leading ladies in this gender-reversed tale of cons.  Despite their best efforts and the intricate plotting it never really gets going. The original screenplay by Stanley Shapiro & Paul Henning was rewritten for the 1988 film by Dale Launer and is updated/flipped here by Jac Schaefer. Hathaway and Wilson have fun playing in this tale of opposites as the classy versus the low rent double act, Hathaway essaying Michael Caine while Wilson does Steve Martin’s role. There are a few good jokes and a meta reference to Hathaway’s Princess Diaries past when Penny ridicules Josephine’s Julie Andrews accent. Stupidly, this is never revealed as fake despite its evidently poor production:  if she had ironically been identified as an even lower class hustler impersonating a class act we might have got somewhere. The imperfect writing doesn’t play compellingly to the women’s obvious strengths – although at times it threatens to be breathtaking, it settles for the merely silly, denying its own potential for taking down the patriarchal dudes. At least there’s a good butler with Nicholas Woodeson as Albert. A theme song by Meghan Trainor doesn’t save it. Rebel Wilson produced and it’s directed in his debut by The Thick of It‘s Chris Addison. Why are women better suited to the con than men?

The Running Man (1963)

You’re not in Croydon any more. Stella Black (Lee Remick) returns from the memorial service for Rex, her late husband, a pilot who died in a gliding accident. He (Laurence Harvey) is in fact alive and well and in hiding at a secluded seaside boarding house having defrauded his insurer Excelsior out of a huge sum of money for his premature death after they failed to pay out for an accident involving his airline business. Stella joins him in Malaga, Spain where he has changed his appearance and is living under the assumed name of Jim Jerome. Things start to go wrong when an insurance investigator Stephen Maddox (Alan Bates) appears to be following Stella as she drives her expensive car and enjoys the high life at a lovely hotel … He shouldn’t have married her. Adapted by John Mortimer from Shelley Smith’s novel The Ballad of the Running Man, this starts out as a sunny neo noir suspenser and turns into something quite different with a nice twist that dictates the outcome. Harvey and Remick are superb as the beautiful blonde married couple whose fate alters irrevocably and their relationship with it; while the issue of mistaken identity regarding Bates is wonderfully played out, subtly inverting the entire premise so that it rebounds with catastrophic consequences. Thanks to Robert Krasker’s cinematography (a very different experience to the kind of exploitation of locations in The Third Man) Spain looks stunning and the sinister nature of the story comes entirely from the construction and playing. Never was misunderstanding so well portrayed: everything here is lost in translation. Watch out for Fernando Rey as a policeman and Noel Purcell and Eddie Byrne have small roles in a production partly shot at Ardmore Studios in Ireland.  Directed by Carol Reed. They’ll have to put up the insurance premiums on anyone who wants to make love to you

The Good Liar (2019)

What I deplore more than anything is deception. Career con artist Roy Courtnay (Ian McKellen) can hardly believe his luck when he meets wealthy recently widowed Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren) online. As Betty opens her life and bland suburban home to him, Roy is surprised to find himself caring about her, turning what should be a straightforward swindle into the most treacherous tightrope walk of his life. Her PhD student grandson Stephen (Russell Tovey) makes it clear he suspects Roy is out for financial gain and turns up at various encounters. When Roy is away from Betty he’s in London organising a long con from investors using Russian decoys with co-conspirator Vincent Halloran (Jim Broadbent). One of the victims follows Roy in the street one day and after he is dispatched under a Tube train Roy decides to take Betty on holiday to Berlin where a surprise awaits … It’s like being smothered in beige. Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Nicholas Searle’s novel goes in different directions and manages to constantly surprise while being faithful to the traits established in the first scenes. McKellen and Mirren effortlessly plumb the characterisation, coming up trumps as the narrative brings us back to a very different world where the stakes where initially raised. The story’s roots in 1940s Germany are jaw-dropping when revealed – this is far from being a conventional story of a duped geriatric in some pensions scam:  we are tipped off when McKellen drops his act early on and meets his fellow crims at Stringfellows’ strip club and we meet the guys who want to join in the quick profit as investors (nice to recognise Mark Lewis Jones and Lucian Msamati from the astonishingly violent summer TV hit Gangs of London). Now that’s not a typical octagenarian move. We have to look after what we’ve worked to secure. The long con twists wonderfully in Mirren’s favour in Berlin when another identity is uncovered and the suspense ratchets up several notches as an obscenity from the past is resurrected. The stylish and pacy direction of this wonderfully tangled web is by Bill Condon, who previously worked with McKellen two decades ago on the cherishable Gods and Monsters. Do you know who you are?

The Producers (1968)

Simply hysterical. You know this from the long-running musical but this is the Real McCoy, Mel Brooks’ tale of failed Broadway producer Max Bialystock (the incomparable Zero Mostel, credited here simply by his first name) and naive bookkeeper Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) who sell 25,000% of a terrible show called Springtime for Hitler:  A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden. It’s written by a Nazi hiding in New York.  They stage it in the belief that it will be a terrible flop and they’ll get rich. They hire a dreadful cross-dressing choreographer whose plays always close on the first day of rehearsal. Of course it’s a monster hit. So who’s funnier? Kenneth Mars as the demented playwright? Dick Shawn as the impossibly camp Hitler? Or Zero? Or Gene? You decide. And the show has to be seen to be believed. Gets better with age.